As well as the job theft and wage harm that mass immigration poses to the Western working class, immigration also imports a number of social pathologies including overloading social welfare, health and education services; urban sprawl; traffic congestion; public housing shortages; private housing affordability; Islamic terrorism; sexual harassment and assault by men from Muslim and other sexist cultures; increased crime and gang violence; ‘politically correct’ restrictions on free speech; the fraying of a social cohesion based on a shared Anglo-Saxon history, language and cultural values; and a suite of environmental stresses from unsustainable, immigration-driven population increase including loss of agricultural land for housing, infrastructure funding lags, shrinkage of natural wilderness areas, increased greenhouse gas emissions, more pollution, etc.
2.5.2 Immigration, population growth and the environment
Criticism of population growth, which, in the West, is overwhelmingly immigration-driven, is taboo across the political spectrum because of a de facto alliance between profit-hungry corporate capitalists, establishment politicians who do their bidding (and, for public consumption, venerate GDP growth including its population growth component), electorally powerful ethnic lobby groups, and both the traditional (Marxist) Left, and the new, anti-racism obsessed, identitarian Left.
Capitalists like population growth because having more people to sell stuff to means making more profit. Declining fertility and smaller families in the West is a threat to this, however. In the West since the mid-1970s, the fertility rate (the average number of babies born to a woman over her reproductive lifetime) has been below the population replacement level (around 2.1 babies per woman). Capitalism’s solution to the West’s fertility problem is for the government to import massive numbers of new consumers through immigration.
The environmental costs of this immigration-swelled over-population are significant because any gains in environmental health (through energy efficiency, renewable energy, land use, etc) are tempered or counteracted through a growing population - more people eventually means more total consumption (and its negative environmental consequences) even with lower per capita consumption levels. The more marginal the environmental gains and the larger the rate of population growth, the more will this basic mathematical logic manifest itself.
The Left, ever since Marx’s ancient quarrel with the Reverend Malthus, has argued that overall population size does not matter politically or environmentally. The Left’s focus has been solely on how consumption is distributed amongst the population (on an inequitable class basis under capitalism or an equitable basis under socialism) and not on its total levels or growth trend; and how production is inherently wasteful of resources under profit-driven capitalism but is manageable under socialism; and that human ingenuity and technology can overcome any natural barriers to growth in population and consumption.
This line of argument, however, does not effectively address the basic equation of ‘more people = more consumption = more wasteful use of resources = more pollution’, even if more distributional equality in consumption, and efficiency improvements and technical fixes act as some sort of environmental brake. Less population growth should be an essential element to an environmentally-conscious Left, and, in the West, this means supporting less immigration.
This perspective has been absent, however, from most of the left for most of its history but has become more pronounced under the current era of the identitarian Left where any aspect of immigration has been zealously quarantined from criticism, including environmental-based criticism, because it would affend against ‘racism’ and ‘Diversity’.
This puts the left at odds with the popular view on immigration and population growth. In 2014, for example, only 11% of the British public wanted any further population growth at all for Britain. The Left’s doctrinaire disregard for over-population, and its dominant immigration component, is well past its use-by-date.
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